


Echo

by Grasshunter



Category: Smile For Me (Video Game)
Genre: Bittersweet, Closure, First Kiss, Fluff and Angst, Ghosts, M/M, Post-Bad Ending, Trans Kamal Bora, implied alcohol abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-10
Updated: 2020-01-10
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:28:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22202617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Grasshunter/pseuds/Grasshunter
Summary: Kamal has spent the last two years trying to pretend the Habitat never happened.One day, he goes back.
Relationships: Kamal Bora/Dr. Boris Habit
Comments: 7
Kudos: 49





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by an idea tossed around on the Habitician Hangout server. You guys are the best.

Kamal moved the first box into the Habitat.

That first day on his new job as Dr. Habit's assistant, he stepped into the stagnant air contained in empty concrete walls, looked around, and didn’t see much happiness there at all. It would take a lot of work to make this a happiness resort.

The box he carried in was a simple cardboard one, not full of posters or paint or anything fun – those were all in the boxes Dr. Habit, who was still down in the parking lot, claimed dominion over. Rather, Kamal's box was full of tools and nails and paintbrushes, paint rollers: the implements necessary to _make_ the Habitat.

Kamal set the box on the ground and looked around. The wind shuffled morosely through the broken glass of old windows, making an almost-musical sound that rose and fell quietly. There was no mould, strange stains, or spray-paint tagging on the walls, which surprised Kamal a little; before he realised that nothing alive had been in here to put those things on the concrete. The sheer emptiness was unnerving.

He took a deep breath of stale, dusty air and sighed through his nose. He couldn’t believe he was hanging his career on something that didn’t even exist yet.

Just then, Dr. Habit traipsed through the entrance, whistling some made-up melody. When he walked in, he interrupted his song abruptly to fawn over the skeletal building, lapsing into a lengthy monologue with the phrases _open concept_ and _breathing room_ and _plenty of space to grow!_ ; underneath his excitement, his voice was smooth and low and deep, giving his lofty ideas a sense of contrasting concreteness, one that matched the flat, spartan walls around them.

Kamal watched Dr. Habit walk a circle around the main room, his eyes scanning everywhere like he was at an amusement park; every corner, edge, and flat face of the abandoned building seemed to contain wonders in Dr. Habit's view of the world. His eyes shone brightly when he passed through a square beam of sunlight, shaped by the empty holes where windows were supposed to be.

He looked inspired. He looked excited. Standing in abandonment, in a place surely filled with ghosts of the industrial past, ringed in old concrete and sunlight, he looked hopeful.

It made Kamal stop and watch with something like wonder.

Something caught Dr. Habit’s eye and he turned to look past Kamal. Kamal turned too and saw the beginning of the stairs to the second floor, built out of metal wiring and vaguely creepy, ascending into an unwindowed stairwell in darkness. Dr. Habit practically ran over to the first step – then doubled back to set down the box of art supplies he was still carrying. He plunked it on the ground next to Kamal’s box.

He grabbed Kamal’s hand and led him up the stairs, smiling as he said something about _exploring_ as he bounced up the stairs into the darkness. Stunned by the sudden warmth of Dr. Habit’s hand, Kamal followed.

\-- 霊 --

With the lights off, the stairs were still as dark as they were that first day, even with all the cheery yellow and sunny paintings that had gone up on the walls. No wonder the local kids called this place haunted.

It had been years since the Habitat. Long enough for urban legends to form, but not long enough for Kamal to move on. Standing in the abandoned building evoked so many memories that he couldn’t process them all, the images so vivid that they could have happened yesterday.

(At this point, he didn’t know if he’d move on.)

The Habitat sat on the outskirts of a small city, the one that Kamal hadn’t left -- probably should have left. It was a smaller city, not big enough to feel sprawling, but with enough people to give a certain distance to every interaction; the mutual, tacit acknowledgement of just being faces in a crowd. In this environment, Kamal heard about a lot of things in an urbane mimicry of small-town gossip: gentrification on the south side; recommendations for local businesses; the crash and burn of the new startup out east with the owner’s violent death; the ghost stories spawned from that place as adolescents dared each other to go in and came out screaming.

To the city’s inhabitants, it wasn’t “The Habitat”. It was just “that place out east” with any adjective attached. Usually, _weird_ or _spooky_ or _abandoned_ ended up tacked on as description. If Kamal ended up in a conversation about it, he was always careful to refer to it as “that place” too, like everyone else, to avoid indicating his ties to it; but he’d yet to erase its proper name from his head. After everything that happened, it didn’t deserve the dignity of an actual name, but still, it remained “The Habitat” to him. It was frustrating. It sounded far too much like Habit for his taste, too, and every time he remembered it, he had to fight back against waves of memory and emotion.

Kamal had a life and a job outside of the Habitat now, but he still felt haunted by it. Even when two entire years separated him from that place, he had one foot stuck there across time, like a wire snare digging into the leg of a game animal.

With nothing to lose and _something_ to gain – maybe peace, maybe a reason to finally forget – he’d ended up back here again. He had no idea what he’d hoped to find in the Habitat’s skeleton, and standing in the large centre room that had once seemed so alive, he wasn’t sure he’d find anything at all.

Tattered bits of posters, moth-chewed, scattered the ground, with pieces torn off as souvenirs. There were little sprayed tags and initialed hearts up on the walls. The bright wall paint had faded to something off-yellow and sickly, like old papers or sun-damaged plastic. The fluorescents on the ceiling didn't respond to Kamal flicking the light switch. Dark water tracks, stained with mould, dripped from the unused air vents. When Kamal took a step, glass from broken windows or bottles and dead leaves shifted and crackled underfoot.

It was silent as a cemetery; not even the wind found its way through the windows to push around dust motes on the ground. It gave him the same sense of vague solemnness or emptiness as a graveyard, too, feeling out of place surrounded by dead lives.

Habit's smiling posters – the ones that were still legible – kicked up memories in his head like plumes of dust. He remembered watching Habit put up every single one; unprofessionally, with masking tape.

Is this what closure was supposed to be? All it did was make him feel things that he thought were best put away. _Closure kinda sucks_ , Kamal thought sarcastically, trying to feel something sharp against the hazy fog of solemnness.

He looked at the stairwell again and at the thick darkness that swallowed it, the shapes of stairs descending from it. A plume of cold swept over him and he pushed his jacket sleeves over his hands.

Looking at the stairs, Kamal hoped the urban legends weren’t true. Suddenly self-conscious of some ghost, invisible and watching him from the corner, thinking he was a scaredy-cat, he walked bravely up into the stairwell.

He couldn’t shake the paranoid feeling that there were eyes on him. He ran up the last few flights of stairs to the next floor, eager to get out of the stairwell as quick as he could. The clanking of metal steps under his shoes was loud compared to the thick silence, disrupting the dead peace. The spectral memories the Habitat roused in him continued their turnings, and he indulged in a happier one, trying to shake off the bone-deep chill that suffused the second floor.

\-- 霊 --

Kamal kissed him first. He remembered that clearly.

It was the day before they were set to open, in the middle of spring; the days still cool in their mornings but warming nicely under the sun’s high arc; the first insects starting to reappear, bees loitering in green patches and fields, waiting patiently for the flowers to follow the rains.

Over the past months he’d been hired to help Dr. Habit on the Habitat, they’d gotten close. They didn’t act like a boss and subordinate anymore. They acted like friends. At first, Kamal had welcomed it because it made the work easier; then encouraged it when he found he genuinely enjoyed Dr. Habit’s company; then relied on it when he started subtly flirting and Boris had, just as subtly, returned it. Boris made his heart race and bloom in his chest and made him feel like a middle schooler again, and he didn’t dislike the feeling.

They both knew something was happening but neither of them had breached the subject. On Kamal’s side, it was anxiety that kept him from finally addressing the elephant in the room; anxiety not really spurred on by anything in particular, but still strong enough to wash words from his mouth and keep things as just _hinted_ at.

The night before the Habitat’s grand opening fell on them. Kamal had long gotten used to Boris sleeping overnight in his office, so it didn’t surprise him in the least when Boris made no move to put on his coat and leave, even as seven o’clock crept up on them.

(Boris had gotten very good at dodging Kamal’s questioning and pressures to retire to his house for the night, so Kamal had stopped mentioning it. It became normal when it shouldn’t have, now that he thought about it. But hindsight is 20/20, and all that.)

Kamal had been about to leave but stopped in the middle of grabbing his little courier bag of paperwork and thin paintbrushes: ones he’d use to repaint damage to the walls when Habit got himself too excited and flung something in reach.

(That had become normal, too.)

Kamal dropped his bag and plucked out his wallet and keys, shoving them in his pockets. He turned to look at Boris and said something like, “Wanna celebrate?” He offered to run to the store and buy something to commemorate completing the Habitat. The excitement was buzzing in both of them; it especially radiated off of Boris, and it soaked into Kamal by proximity. It reminded him of that first day, Boris’ eyes shining in the sun and full of bright, clever thought while wreathed in ruin. That apparition of Boris resurrected itself and stood before Kamal now, despite everything that had happened and changed since then, like an echo across time. It made Kamal’s heart feel light and thrumming again, looking at Boris.

Boris smiled and said yes.

Kamal came back in record time with a bottle of supermarket champagne. They popped the cork in the office, laughing as they poured it fizzing into their coffee mugs because Kamal didn't buy cups for their impromptu wrap-up party.

Then Boris had put his hand over Kamal’s mug of champagne before he could lift it. “Don’t you have to drive, Kamal?” he asked.

Kamal didn’t mention that Boris should be driving home too; should have driven home the past several days. Instead, he said, “Oh, I was planning on spending the night.”

Boris’ eyebrows slowly raised, practically to his hairline.

Kamal’s already lacklustre confidence, along with any sense that he knew what he was doing, vaporised at Boris’ facial expression. The double meaning of his own words hit him like a freight train. “I mean. I didn’t think we were gonna do anything, you know? I wasn’t staying so I could _make_ anything happen, yeah? I just wanted to, like, celebrate this because this is a _pretty big thing_ and I don’t know, I’m kinda proud of both of us, and I know there’s both a bed and a couch here, so like –"

Boris cut him off with a deep, genuine laugh. “Kamal! Relax. I am teasing. We are celebrating the Habitat, no? That is all we are doing.” He took his hand off Kamal’s champagne mug. “I like you, in a case. I’m celebrating friendship, too!”

Kamal choked on air -- "I like you", God -- and felt his face heat up. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course, thanks, Boris.” Avoiding eye contact, he held out his champagne and they clunked their mugs together, Kamal stuttering out a “cheers”. After a sip, Kamal tried to regain a shred of his dignity: “It’s ‘in any case’,” he mumbled.

Rolling his eyes, Boris said, “Close enough.”

They drank into the night, chatting first about business and their plans for the Habitat, then wandering off-topic into anything that came to mind.

When Boris asked about his pursuit of testosterone therapy, Kamal surprised himself; he simply answered that he was waiting for a referral. He didn’t get touchy at all about being asked about his transition, nor did he feel uncomfortable with Boris asking. It was, actually, a little endearing that Boris cared enough to ask.

Kamal, though, avoided the topic of Boris’ missing teeth, though he’d been dying to ask. He’d learned not to touch that.

But maybe his comfort with Boris that night was encouraged by the champagne. Kamal was able to finish one mug and steal a little sip from Boris’ second before he was woozy when he stood up. He tried to get some water and his head spun pleasantly, making him giggle and stumble. Boris was at his side quickly, laughing and calling him a lightweight as he led him to the couch.

“Shit, sorry,” Kamal said, holding a fistful of Boris’ coat for support. “I don’t drink much and I went a little too fast.”

“It’s fiiiine. It’s late, anyway,” lilted Boris, almost like his words were lyrics to a song. It made Kamal snicker a little.

“Look at you. You’re not even drunk.”

“I’m Russian,” Boris giggled. He tried to guide Kamal onto the sofa, but Kamal had an idea, suddenly, and goddamnit if he wasn’t going to try and make it work. He pulled away from Boris’ hands a little, who looked at him, confused. Kamal tugged Boris’ coat to the side, trying to guide him towards the couch.

After a moment without Boris moving, Kamal figured it was better to rip off the bandage and just be blunt.

Kamal said, “For fuck’s sake, Boris, I want to kiss you but you’re too damn tall and I need you to sit down on the couch so I can reach.”

Boris froze for half a second, and Kamal’s heart shot to his feet, but then he finally sat down on the couch and looked at Kamal with deep amusement, expectant.

Kamal didn’t hesitate. There was no sense in making this any more awkward than he already had. He leaned in and kissed him. 

After a breath, Boris tilted his head into the kiss and raised a hand to trace his thumb along Kamal’s chin.

And that counted as breaching _the topic at hand_ , in Kamal’s book. Finally.

Kamal’s heart had been racing just before he kissed Boris, strong enough to the point where he wanted to abort mission and kick Boris off the couch and go to bed like it didn’t happen. He knew Boris would let him do that. But when he finally just went for it and he felt that space between them close, he relaxed. It felt _right_ in a way that he couldn’t describe very well.

He knew Boris could feel him smiling.

After a long moment, Kamal broke away laughing, both at the situation and just in joy. “Gotta say, there was no worse way to set this up on my part. I'm so dumb.”

“You misspeak. There was no _better_ way.” Boris toed his shoes off and kicked them somewhere on the other side of the room. He softly grabbed Kamal’s hand, and said, “I don’t feel like walking _all the way_ to my bed. Do you mind if I stay on the couch?"

Kamal flushed bright red but tried his best to keep a cool, unaffected expression. "Oh, sure. You'd make a great pillow. I wouldn't mind at all."

With how much bigger Boris was than him, Kamal could curl up in his arms like in a huge weighted blanket. He felt safe there, and he'd be happy if he could do that all the time. And when morning crept through the windows on the day of the Habitat's grand opening, he felt well-rested for once -- even as he woke up slightly hungover.

\-- 霊 --

Martha’s remains were standing out in the courtyard. The air was still vaguely metallic, the smell of nitrous oxide, a testament to Martha’s raw strength. Maybe Habit was right to admire this thing so much. Kamal pulled the collar of his shirt up against his nose and mouth, feeling sick at the smell. 

Late afternoon light and the wear of time painted her teeth, ironically, sepia. Little fingers of rust pushed up from the bases of her teeth like weeds. Her lips were destroyed in the explosion, leaving only the tombstones of her teeth standing crooked against the wreckage.

Even though he was sure Habit’s body had been removed, the bits of rust at the base of Martha’s teeth looked too much like blood splatters. Like Habit had been chewed up by the machine. In a way, he had been, both by Martha herself and everything she represented. It was a horrible image and Kamal looked away towards the browned grass, nauseous.

Kamal looked up at the little house that had Habit’s office, supported by rickety metal legs, knobbly-kneed and rusted. Like Habit’s take on Baba Yaga and her home's thin chicken legs.

Kamal smiled. Boris would have liked that reference, the old Russian.

Surrounded by the dead courtyard and chipped concrete walls, faded from childlike pastels to shades of grey and brown, everything was so familiar it made him somehow nostalgic for the horrorscape the Habitat became over time. He thought about the Habiticians he met; the huge emotions his relationship with Habit brought, not all of them bad; the time he’d spent bringing Habit’s dream into reality, working by his side as his assistant.

Dredging up these memories, wincing at the more painful ones, he looked up to the windows of Habit’s office. He swore he could almost see Habit himself standing there, looking over his courtyard, a sight familiar like coming home.

When he blinked, Habit had disappeared from the window.

Kamal kept his eyes on the window, backing up slowly, trying to see if there was a shadow or object in the office. There was nothing.

Unnerved, he turned fully and walked quickly out of the courtyard. He went to unlock the gate to Habit’s office and found it was already open. Kamal walked through the tunnel, steps echoing like someone walking just a hair behind him.

The back of his neck prickled and he turned around, his footsteps echoing into silence. In the tunnel, the air was completely still and frigid like it was air-conditioned, smelling of old, damp air and mildew. Kamal turned his head owlishly, searching wide-eyed in the darkness for _something_ , but saw only pale concrete extending both forward and back.

After a moment, he continued. The echoes restarted.

\-- 霊 --

Kamal said the first thing that started their fight.

One year had passed since the Habitat had opened to a moderate success – Kamal’s standard of “success” being that the business hadn’t fallen flat on its face and could keep paying him. The season had cycled to spring again, bringing back the whole spiel of warming days, the return of bees, the grass and flowers.

Martha was finished that spring, too. She sort of just materialised herself in the courtyard slowly; at first a wireframe with exposed steel innards, then a distinct smokestacked box, then a grinning mouth, full of teeth. Kamal had no idea where the funding for her had come from: there were no construction invoices, receipts for materials, or anything to show where she had come from in his records. All Kamal could assume was that whatever money had gone into her didn’t come from the Habitat’s accounts.

Kamal didn’t want to take the next logical step, that the money had all come from Boris himself.

Just like last year, what pulled up the spring grass and flowers from the dirt were the rains. April showers bring May flowers and all that. Originally, Martha had huge, polished, white slabs of teeth; then with two days of heavy rains, rust crept up the steel flats of teeth like ivy up a trellis and tainted them red. The Habiticians were frightened by what amounted to a sculpture of bloody teeth in the courtyard -- but no one was more distressed than Habit.

Habit spent the morning he discovered Martha’s disfigured teeth locked in his office. The text Kamal got that morning was worryingly short of detail, stating with too many emoticons that he was in charge “untill fruther notice. :-) :-)” He jumped in dutifully as substitute supervisor of the Habitat; but he spent his downtime wringing his hands in front of the closed door to Boris' office, unsure of what to do. Occasionally he’d hear things _thunk_ against the walls, sometimes punctuated with the clatter of something breaking. He heard mumbling, too, in Russian. More than anything there was a lot of sobbing. Kamal knocked once but Boris had _growled_ at him to leave him be with genuine anger in his voice, something Kamal had never heard before, much less directed at _him._

Around noon, Kamal’s toothbrush disappeared. And slowly, everyone in the Habitat had come to him to ask about their toothbrushes. Kamal spent his afternoon digging through Tim Tam’s room, who glared at him the whole time with all the injustice a tiny body could contain, until someone nervously told him where everyone’s toothbrushes had gone.

Next thing he knew, Kamal was watching through a window, dazed, at the bizarre sight of Boris scrubbing frantically at Martha’s teeth with a pile of confiscated toothbrushes. His motions were frantic and uncoordinated like he was being held at gunpoint to clean Martha’s teeth. No one was brave enough to confront Boris and they all carefully avoided looking or even mentioning the spectacle as they went about their business. Kamal stayed glued to the window, watching.

After almost two hours Boris finally retreated to his office again, leaving a stack of toothbrushes with all their bristles rubbed off on the ground. Martha’s teeth were white again but the door to his office remained shut.

Later, Trencil came up to him while he was lost in thought on the roof. The day was coming to a close, the sun masked behind clouds and floating just a hair above the horizon, light slanted and tinted foggy with cloud cover. He asked, “Why are you still with Dr. Habit?”

Kamal said, without hesitation, “Well, he’s my boss. I’m supposed to be here.”

Trencil breathed a little laugh through his nose and looked directly at Kamal, pulling him into eye contact. “You know that’s not what I meant.”

And then Kamal realised that Trencil knew about him and Boris. Of course. They were acquaintances, Trencil being excellent company compared to the quirky personalities of the Habitat, but Kamal had never even approached the topic of Boris.

But Kamal wasn’t surprised. Trencil had a feeling of ages-old wisdom about him, not tired or cynical but simply knowing, with eyes that cut through bullshit masterfully and saw the heart of things, the blood running through them. Like Gandalf, almost, except clean-shaven and fashionable.

Kamal thought that he and Boris were subtle about their relationship, though. Trencil had only just arrived at the Habitat with Nat, but he’d managed to figure it out.

With a sinking fear almost like guilt, Kamal wondered how much Trencil knew. If he knew about the late nights trying to get Boris into bed as he filled pages with painted toothy smiles and scribbled Cyrillic. If he knew how their relationship felt like a paradox, with Boris and Kamal almost one being, no borders between them and suffocating, but also so far apart as to fit planets in the space between them. If he knew about the moods that would consume Boris for days at a time; ones that made him prone to sullen silence and 14-hour naps – or the ones that made him bounce off the walls with rude, snarky insults flung at Kamal and searing with their truth and vindictiveness; made his hands shake like with too much caffeine; made him snap his head around to stare behind him into open hallways, frightened eyes searching, as if he’d heard his name called but no one was there.

If he knew how scared Kamal was. If he knew how tired Kamal was.

He fumbled for an answer to Trencil’s question. He should have had one but he couldn’t find one.

The silence that stretched between them was what Trencil took as his answer. He squeezed Kamal’s shoulder softly, careful to not overstep any lines, which Kamal was grateful for. “You know where to find me. I’ll be here if you need me.”

Trencil disappeared, footsteps silent. Kamal stayed there, not really thinking but simply floating for a bit, as the sun went down.

Later, Kamal let himself into the waiting room outside Boris’ office and called if there was anything he needed. He could’ve been more specific and asked if he’d ate or drank anything, but Kamal already knew the answer. He figured Boris would take it as an accusation, too. He wouldn’t be completely wrong.

Boris stepped slowly from the harsh light of his den. The lights were off in the waiting room and his looming, backlit figure blocked most of the light as he ducked through the doorway. 

“No, Kamaaal, there iiisn’t.” That strange slur his voice took on whenever his mood hit a peak or a trough – not a thicker accent, not vodka-blurred syllables, something else entirely – was more prominent than ever. It made him sound like a cartoon, drawing out the vowels like something lyrical. He smiled at Kamal with his mouth closed, eyes gleaming. He looked pale.

Off-kilter, confused, scared, and not even sure if he was in love – if he was _ever_ in love – Kamal couldn’t detach from this situation anymore. He took a deep breath and, though he failed to keep the shake out of his voice, he said, “Well. Just let me know, Doc. Because I care. Even if you keep shutting me out to paint on the walls. I’ll be here.” He said it with grit teeth, angrily, before he could get a hold of himself, but it was too true to hold back.

And with that, the fight started. Boris’ eyes narrowed. “Kamal.”

Kamal jumped at the sound of his name – he shouldn’t have, and as normal as everything else had become, being afraid of Boris _wasn’t_ normal and Kamal didn’t _know_ why he was afraid now – but didn’t have time to process it because Boris continued. “Your teeth.” Boris’ eyes flicked down to his mouth, lancing Kamal with self-consciousness. “Have you not been brushie-ing them? They look fowl, like chickens. Yellowed.”

There was a second where time stopped and Kamal played the words back over and over in his mind, making sure he had heard Boris correctly, then he went white-hot with anger and hurt. “Wh – _What?!_ I can’t believe you just said that. Why did you – Why would _you_ take my toothbrush and then _insult me_ for having unclean teeth? You won’t even talk to me to let me know what’s going on!” Kamal remembered yelling more things at Habit, about Martha and teeth and their distance, but he didn’t remember exactly what he said. The dentist only stood there and watched as Kamal released all his anger, fear and horror. It was so impersonal that it only pissed off Kamal more.

Kamal remembered crying at the end. He remembered saying, “I don’t even recognise you anymore.”

There was a long silence before Habit said flatly, “I don’t think I like your teeth as much as I used.”

Kamal said, “Well, you can’t fire me. I _quit_.” Kamal turned and stormed out without another word and he heard the office door slam when he turned his back.

In minutes he had his things packed up, but without anywhere else to go immediately, he just decided to stay. Habit was so distant from the Habitat that Kamal doubted he would care. He planned to spend the next few weeks in the refuge he helped build hunting for a job and an apartment.

Only one new resident was coming in a week and a half. Some young little florist. Habit could deal with them as he searched for Kamal’s replacement. 

_He’ll be fine on his own,_ Kamal told himself.

In the meantime, Kamal spent his days on the roof, looking out towards the city. Boris never came for him. 

Then the PSAs began and Kamal wasn’t sure if he wanted Habit to come for him. Whenever he watched those at night, he couldn’t tell if he was worried about Boris or glad that he got out when he did. The puppet was sort of cute, though.

Kamal said the first thing that ended their relationship – and it was also him who walked away first.

At least Boris had left him that dignity.

\-- 霊 --

Kamal had to take the fire escape up to Habit’s office, as the elevator was unpowered. As hellish as an abandoned, dark stairwell was, the elevator would have been far worse, especially if it broke down while he was alone in it.

Out of breath after practically sprinting up the stairs, he flew into the waiting room and stopped. It was horribly dark, to the point where Kamal had to use the torch he brought as an afterthought. Old, cobwebbed chairs stood along the wall, their silhouettes like an audience, painted black-and-white in the stark torchlight. The light caught the edge of the doorway to Habit’s office proper.

He felt like he was walking backwards into a memory, going directly against his instinct to move forward in time and simply falling with the gravity of his past. He remembered his anger, his frustration, his fear at what was happening to Boris and having no way to stop it; not knowing if it was his _place_ to stop it. But now, with time and distance, irrational regret filled him, made him wonder if there was something he could have done differently where there really wasn’t.

Standing in abandonment, in a place overflowing with ghosts and memories echoing from his past, ringed in old concrete and sunlight, all he could do was stand there and remember and _miss_. He’d never had the childlike hope that Habit once did, the beautiful kind that shined out of him in his eyes, illuminated by sun through the bare windows. He felt he'd never leave this place or stop hearing its echoes.

Resolving to never set foot here again, he stepped into Habit’s office. Better make this a thorough visit while it lasted.

The black cold of the room made Kamal's hair stand on end. His torch barely illuminated anything, corporeal as the darkness was. His anxiety quickly changed gears from regret over remembering to a more physical one, a fear of death or predation buzzing in his limbs. He felt himself waiting on-edge for a sudden noise, ready to leap out of his skin at the slightest cause.

Kamal walked over to Habit’s little desk. Fully curious now, especially since he hadn’t seen Habit’s office since he quit, he started to dig around. There wasn't anyone there to tell him not to, anyway. Still, he almost felt the physical weight of guilt on his shoulders and hands as he rifled through the drawers’ contents: a capped metal flask, old paperwork, scribbles in a pidgin of Russian and English, a doodle of a nervous cartoon character with Kamal’s likeness, an uncapped, empty flask, blueprints for the Habitat… Nothing particularly interesting. There was nothing to explain exactly what had happened to Boris; no answers to be found by snooping through a dead man’s things.

A spider skittered out from under some papers and Kamal slammed the drawer shut. It sounded much louder than it should have, compared to the office’s dead silence, and startled Kamal.

He shivered and tugged his jacket tighter around him, feeling twitchy with anxiety.

Wiping the dust on his hands on his jeans, Kamal walked over to the dual windows that overlooked the courtyard. It was a nice view, marred only by the sharp-edged hole in the glass that let the draft in. Flower Kid did what they had to, but something in Kamal couldn’t help thinking that there was another way – despite the violence that Habit had proved himself capable of. There was no easy answer to whether Flower Kid was in the right and thinking too long about it made Kamal sick to his stomach, so he forced himself to stop thinking.

In the silence and loneliness, Kamal thought about Habit. He’d built up so much anger and resentment to protect himself from his pain, starting when their relationship was getting fucked up and Boris started to spiral. Frankly, he was tired of feeling it after all these years.

Kamal rested his forehead against the window and looked down at the remnants of Martha. It was a hell of a drop from here. Must’ve hurt on the way down.

Thoroughly exhausted and very cold, Kamal turned to leave when Boris blocked his way.

Kamal froze.

He stared at the apparition, wondering if he was hallucinating. Boris floated half an inch above the ground; he was see-through and looked like he was pasted over the world, like a green screen. It looked like a bedsheet material printed with Boris’ image with a light shining behind him. 

As two-dimensional as the figure looked, there was so much depth to the sorrow on his face.

He was looking straight at Kamal.

Horrified, Kamal stumbled backward with a yelp and pressed up against the glass behind him. “D—Doc? Oh my God—” he choked out. The cold intensified like standing in a walk-in freezer, and Kamal shook, both chilled and frightened.

The figure before him jumped. “No. It is me. I won’t hurt you, I promise.” Even though Boris sounded like he was calling to him at the end of a tunnel, distorted and echoed, it was still that distinct baritone, unmistakeable. “Ka- _mal_. Your voice…” 

“What? Oh. Uh. Yeah.” The last time he’d spoken to Boris was before he’d started testosterone, he supposed. “I finally got on T and it made my voice deep.” Though it wasn’t as low as it normally was, as his voice was tightened almost to a squeak with fear and disbelief.

Boris smiled at him, muted at first, then giving way to something soft and bright like a sunflower. “I’m so happy for you. Oh, you’re so handsome, _solnyshko_ , I always thought you were but now –” Boris beamed and raised a hand to his mouth, covering his smile as he looked Kamal up and down, apparently at a loss for words. The little movement as Boris brought his claws to his mouth looked strange, too smooth and unreal, like a video running at 60fps compared to an old computer game.

Hearing Boris' voice say his name and call him that pet name, “little sun”, brought tears to Kamal’s eyes. The fear he felt flattened a little with something like relief. He never thought he’d hear it again and he wondered if he was dreaming. There was a clarity in Boris’ gently glowing eyes that had been missing for a long time before his death, one that Kamal had missed so badly.

Kamal couldn’t tell if his heart was breaking or putting itself back together.

“Yeah. I've changed. T is a hell of a drug. But. Like… what?” Kamal wanted to kick himself for both letting the silence stretch out and for not being able to phrase things at all. “I’m just. Confused? Like, are you a _ghost?”_

“Yes! It appears so. Like… Kapser, I am a friendly one.”

“Casper,” corrected Kamal with a smile. Oh, God, he missed Boris making silly mistakes like that.

“Casper, then. Always correcting me, hmm?” Boris teased good-naturedly.

“I… God." He laughed. "What have you been doing this whole time? At least, I’m gonna assume you’ve been here since…” Kamal gestured vaguely to the hole in the window.

“Yes. I tried to leave the Habitat, but something stops me. I feel… tied here. Like a kite on a string-ie. I spend my time terrorising children these days. Not so different than when I was a dentist.” Boris winked conspiratorially at Kamal, who laughed despite himself.

“So, the ghost stories are true,” said Kamal. “You know, you’re the talk of the town. You’ve got entire legends dedicated to you.”

“What!? Impossible. Me?” Boris smiled and waved a clawed hand dismissively.

“Well, something’s gonna happen when you whisper about stealing people’s teeth and smile at kids in the darkness. They think you were a serial killer, or a demon someone summoned, like Bloody Mary. Whack stuff.”

Boris looked sad, all of a sudden. Kamal cringed at his description of Boris in legend and was about to backpedal before Boris interrupted.

“Ah, they are not entirely wrong, are they? But more importantly, Kamal! Why are you here, visiting an old, dead man?! You should be out doing things not involving abandoned buildings!”

Kamal laughed aloud, shaking his head. He accepted the subject change gratefully and said, “God. I don’t know. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you or the Habitat or… everything that happened. I just wanted to see it again. Lemme tell you, I was _not_ expecting to have a séance. Should’ve lit some candles for the occasion.”

Boris laughed, looking brighter after Kamal’s insensitivity earlier. “I’m… glad you came. I wanted to see you again, too.”

The silence pressed between them. There was so much to say, but Kamal struggled to find words for it; to decide what he wanted to say first, out of everything. He felt overwhelmed. He felt he should be angry at Boris, after years of resentment and hurt building up both before and after Boris died. “I also wanna know… what happened? I remember saying that I didn’t recognise you anymore, towards the end.” Boris flinched, but Kamal continued. “And I think about it sometimes, and I still feel that way. You turned into someone else. You scared me, Doc. What happened?”

Boris sighed deeply. “I don’t know what happened. I did not feel like myself. I was scared. When I was on those… in those episodes, the big scary ones where I said bad thingies and threw thingies and hurt people like you and that flower child, I felt like Pabit.” At Kamal’s visible confusion, he pointed to the corner of the room, where there was a felt hand puppet propped up on a filing cabinet. “Ah. Puppet Habit. Like being controlled. I felt full of stars and I was bursting at seams. Like falling and missing the ground or floating in space or being inside the Moon. I heard things that weren’t there. I’d be scared the whole time and then I’d fall down to Earth and remember everything and be even more scared. Between them, I was waiting for the next one to come and swoop me away.

“I wish I had name for it. Those times were when I was the scariest, I think, and I’d like a name for it, but I don’t have one. I should have looked harder for one when I was normal but I was scared of what name it would be. I’m sorry, Kamal. That was something I could have done, but I didn’t, so focused I was on the Habitat and trying to make the world happy.”

It was apparent in Boris’ voice and his poorer-than-usual grammar, how he struggled to describe an experience that could probably never be put accurately into words. The lingering thought that _it didn’t have to turn out this way_ swelled in the back of his mind, filled with hurt and pain and longing for what could have been. Kamal had been hurt many times over and nothing could change that, but Boris knew it, too. Hearing that apology made Kamal feel lighter.

Kamal took a moment to collect himself and clear his throat. “I’m… Thank you for telling me. It took you dying to get me to finally hear this, but I’m glad I can understand a little more.” They both laughed drily. “You hurt me. A lot. You frustrated me and I cared so much about you. I still do.” Kamal took a shaky breath. “I missed you. I wish this hadn’t happened.”

“…Do you mean you wish we hadn’t happened at all, or that I hadn’t gotten sicky?”

“I wish the second one all the time, and sometimes I wish the first one. But you made me really happy. I really liked you, Boris. I don’t regret us being together and I don’t regret caring about you. I don’t know if you deserved to… die.”

“I hurt the flower kid really bad. I hurt _you_.”

“I know. And there’s no way to go back and fix it, yeah? I wish you could’ve recognised that things were going a little outta control. But. In hindsight? Everything that happened wasn’t because you were mean or evil or anything. Or, like. A bad person.”

“…I did things that bad people do.”

“But that doesn’t mean you were one-hundred percent bad, y’know? Because you made me happy a lot, too. Even if you made me sad and scared and angry sometimes when I didn’t understand what was happening. I’m still…” Kamal choked up and he had to take a moment. “I’m still glad I got to know you. While you were alive.”

Kamal looked at Boris. He seemed to be made of moonlight, unreal like the way three in the morning feels. He was incredibly pretty like this, clear-eyed and spectral. “I forgive you,” said Kamal.

He’d never seen Boris cry in life, and seeing a novel expression on the familiar figure only solidified the fact that this was real; that he wasn’t just hallucinating. “…Thank you.” His voice was thick and shaky and laced with what sounded like VHS static.

They spent the rest of the evening talking, like they used to. Death leaves a lot to catch up on, and Kamal especially took an interest in the mechanics of being a ghost. Boris, regretfully, didn’t know too much either, as there wasn’t a ghost handbook made for him when he died, a la Beetlejuice; but that just left more room for theories on what supernatural powers Boris had hidden up his sleeve.

For a moment, Kamal felt time had turned backwards and he was fresh out of dental school again, chatting with Dr. Habit as they worked on the Habitat together. Even in the darkness and sheer cold of the room, his eyes adjusted after a while and the inside of his coat built up enough body heat to ward off the chill. He perched on the edge of Boris’ desk and kicked his feet back and forth, talking as the sun went down.

When the room finally went dark with the fading sun, Boris politely kicked him out, in a way only friends can. “I don’t want you to live here in a graveyard. You have a big, whole, entire life out there. One without mothies eating up everything you own.” Boris rolled his eyes at the conspicuous holes in the posters on the walls.

“Aren’t you gonna get lonely, by yourself?”

“There are more than enough kids coming in to scare. I’ll be finesies,” Boris said, sing-song.

“Alright. Well.” Kamal pushed himself off the desk. “It _is_ cold as hell in here. …I’m glad you didn’t end up there, by the way.”

“Same, same. Maybe later I'll go on vacation there. See you late, _zaychik_.”

“It’s 'see you later'.” Kamal smiled. “And, yeah. See ya.”

Boris disappeared with a laugh and a flicker like static. The cold in the room faded like it drained out of the broken glass window, leaving the office feeling vacuumed and hollow.

\-- 霊 --

When Kamal left the office the first time, it was after he quit both his job and Boris. He was in tears, throat raw from both yelling and emotion. The second time he left, he was in tears again, but feeling lighter; with an empty sort of peace in him.

Echoes followed him his whole way out. The darkness in the tunnel seemed almost lighter than it had earlier. When he got to its end and stepped out into the main room, he saw that the angle of the sun had changed to shine through the windows.

He looked at the soft squares of illumination on the ground and remembered Boris in that light, the memory still vivid after all these years.

Try as he might, he couldn’t stop caring about Boris and his Habitat. He didn’t think he’d ever stop. But he could move on.

Kamal walked out to his car, the silence of the Habitat’s skeleton following him even outside. He drove away.

Maybe, the next time Boris’ birthday came around, he’d come and leave a little bouquet with Martha. Boris would like that.


	2. Deleted Scene

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Takes place during the ghost Habit scene. I took it out because I felt it was too light, but I liked it too much to toss.

“I wish I could hug or kiss you or something, one last time.”

“Wanna give it a shot?” Kamal asked.

Boris opened his arms with a sad smile. “Sure. I don’t think it’ll work, though.”

Kamal stepped forward. “Aw, Doc, I thought you were an optimiii _iiist –”_ When he pressed his hand experimentally into Boris, his hand went right through him. It felt like he stuck his hand into ice-cold Vaseline, thick and cool and bizarre. Boris went rigid, too, and Kamal pulled his hand back like he’d been burned.

“That was… something,” said Kamal. His hand was still ringing with cold and he tried to rub feeling back into it with his other hand.

Boris blinked down at Kamal. “You are… very toasty.”

“What??”

“I mean you’re very warm.”

“Oh. Thanks, I try.”


End file.
